The SE trade winds are starting to firmly establish themselves again, so we had had to get underway quickly to get to the Lau Group of islands to the SE of the check-in port of Savusavu. Its only an overnight passage of about 100nm, but unfortunately there has been a lot of bouncy ‘working to weather’ so far. Hopefully it settles down by the time we make the pass into the coral reef of Fiji’s Bay of Islands at Vanua Balavu. Our first Kava ceremony awaits!

Bula!

There was not a breath of wind nor ripple in the water for the last 4nm as we worked our way up the coast under a full moon, leaving a trail of outraged bioluminescent plankton sparkling electric blue in our wake.

After around 1100 nautical miles and 7-3/4 days, we slowly entered the Copra Shed Marina mooring field in Savusavu just before midnight on June6th. With much torch-waving, gesturing and frantic paddling of his dinghy (his outboard had died) the night watchman directed us to our designated mooring and at 12:15 am, handed us the lines and we could at last shut down for a well deserved rest.

We busied ourselves for a bit though, tidying up in anticipation of the arrival of officials from Health, Immigration, Customs and Biosecurity Departments, before collapsing almost instantly to sleep. The Fijian officials who arrived later that morning could not have been more cheerful, friendly and welcoming - by far the most pleasant border experience I can ever remember!

It is a bit at odds with the zen of sailing, but we are just counting down the miles to the destination now. We have had quite benign conditions for this passage - so benign that the good old Ford Lehman diesel is getting a great workout. While we are at last having a good trade wind sail now, we worked the iron sail hard to get ahead of a potentially significant weather event, which fortunately has been downgraded to ‘garden variety’ tropical storms. Still to be respected and wary of, but not the ‘oh my gawd its a cyclone at sea’ type of thing… so, we are trying to make the anchorage at Savusavu before the worst is expected to hit.

At the rate we are doing now (7.3kn), we will get there with a few hours to spare, but as we move into Fijian waters properly we will likely be slowing down as the winds become shifty, influenced by islands. While we are excited to get there, where friends await with pina coladas on standyby, its is a little bittersweet saying farewell to this passage. Kat and I have enjoyed it immensely. We have not really suffered massive sleep depriavation ( though we are both looking forward to a long sleep) as we play to each others normal body clocks - she is a night owl, going well unti 1-2am, and I am an early riser, so a 2am start to the day works just fine for me…

Night passages are very special as well, the timelessness of just you in the cockpit, in the dark, listening to the water slipping by, seeing in the moonlight and feeling the power of larger waves building behind you and lifting you up as they muscle their way along… aaahh, I seem to have rediscovered the zen of sailing again :blush:

We crossed the 22.5 degrees south this evening so we are officially in the tropics now! Its been a slow day, relatively benign seas and not much wind. We pulled out the gib as well and even though the wind is aft of the beam it seems to have given us a little boost. The wind is dying though so I expect to deploy the iron sail as well!
Todays 24h run was 158nm. Fingers crossed we make Savusavu on Wednesday morning.
Cheers!

Frustratingly slow progress trying to sail without our main. We barely eak along at 5kn, which is well below the target speed we need to beat the thunderstorms that will descend and on and linger around the Savusavu area for several days next week. Given our relatively slow pace this last day we may not get there until Wednesday morning now - hopefully before the main t-storm activity starts… The amount of distance we can cover in the next day will decide our course of action, so we are motoring along at speed (well, 6-7 knots!).

We are both still in great spirits and enjoying being hundreds of miles away from anybody else. Missing friends and family though, but still pinching ourselves in disbelief :slight_smile:

24h run to 9 this morning was 142nm.

We spent today 'climbing' up a ridge of high pressure and have had calm, increasingly warm seas and a clear blue sunny sky, so Kat broke out her sarong to wear! Neither of us can believe that we are finally, after all these years of talking and planning, really doing this, that we are actually more than half way to Fiji now. Crazy.

Since we now have no mainsail to use, we decided to hoist the storm trysail to see if that would give us any drive at all. For those of you reading this that are not familiar with such things, the 'storm tri' is used when conditions are truly horrible and using your mainsail, even heavily reefed down, would be too much for you and the boat. The tri is very tough, made of very heavy (bright orange!) sailcloth and is probably less than a third the surface area of our mainsail. We think we maybe got an extra half a knot while motor sailing with it, so better than nothing! Being so small its a good thing that the weather forecasts show that we should not need to go to windward, because it would be a real struggle to get anywhere with it.

Given yesterdays dramas with the sail, the 24h distance covered this morning by 9am was only 146nm. Still, we are more than half way there and the forecasts look promising for arrival early next week. Yay!